


We can follow the sparks, I'll drive

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Bartender AU, F/M, Flirting, Meet-Cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:56:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23991850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: The first night that Daisy Johnson walks into the bar, leather jacket and swinging hair and smile with a  laugh hidden in it, Robbie thinks of a million stories about her.In which Robbie is a bartender, Daisy brings all her dates to the same bar, and somehow ends up talking to him every night instead.
Relationships: Robbie Reyes/Skye | Daisy Johnson
Comments: 16
Kudos: 78





	We can follow the sparks, I'll drive

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "I Think He Knows" by Taylor Swift.

Robbie Reyes is a good bartender. Great, some might say. He works six nights a week behind the bar at one of Denver's best known speakeasy-style bars, measuring and mixing and pouring and carving off a peel of orange rind with a quick flick of his wrist. One of his signature cocktails finally made it on to the permanent menu after six months of it selling like crazy every time it's a special for the night. He listens to the woes and triumphs of everyone who sidles up to the bar with a practiced sympathetic silence and a towel slung over his shoulder. But what he's best at is being an observer of human nature. 

The thing he likes most about working at the bar is seeing all the people who come in, getting little glimpses into this one evening of their lives. Seeing bits and pieces of their story that he stitches together as he makes their drinks and continues on in his head as he gets off work. Sometimes he even writes down the stories he creates, one hand scribbling down words in the notebooks Gabe gets him every Christmas while he shovels down Chinese takeout with the other in the early hours of the morning. He might be a writer. He's not quite sure yet. But he thinks he's getting there. 

The first night that Daisy Johnson walks into the bar, leather jacket and swinging hair and smile with a laugh hidden in it, Robbie thinks of a million stories about her. 

Daisy picks the bar out of a million other listings on Google Maps because it's close enough to her house that she can walk there while being far enough away that it won't seem obvious if she likes the guy enough to bring him back there. There's an entrance behind a wall of books and a curtained off cozy feeling and a picture of a crème brulee on their Instagram that she really hopes is on the menu tonight. The guy she matched with on Hinge is only five percent less cute than his pictures made him seem and she's hopeful.

That hope is crushed approximately ten minutes in when he tries to tell her what drink to get, blatantly stares at her chest, and starts talking about his salamander collection and doesn't stop.

She makes her way over to the bar to order something she can drink quickly and get out of there and waves the dark-haired bartender over and...wow. He's cute. Seriously cute. Freckles and deep brown eyes and a jawline that's practically flawless. 

“What can I get you?” he asks. He's even cuter up close. Daisy is so glad she has the opportunity to find this out.

“Something to drown my sorrows. Preferably with rum. I'm here on a bad date,” she says and gestures back towards the corner where her date is engrossed in his phone. 

“How do you feel about banana and lime?”

“Sounds great.” Daisy grins at him and leans a little against the bar. 

“So what went wrong? Wait, let me guess,” he says as he starts measuring out rum and throws an assessing look her date's way. “He mentioned his ex-girlfriend within the first five minutes.”

“Nope.”

“Still lives in his parents' basement?”

“No.”

“Tried to recruit you into a multi-level marketing scheme or a cult?”

“No,” she says and laughs. “Just a regular terrible date. I haven't been able to say a thing since we sat down.”

He winces in sympathy and then slides her drink across the bar to her—it's in a lime green tiki glass, with a flower and a skewer of fruit sticking out, and it tastes like long lazy summer nights spent by the ocean. “This one's on the house,” he says and smiles, a dimple deepening in his left cheek. (That's just unfair.) “To make up for the bad date.”

“I'm Daisy,” she blurts out before she turns to go.

“Robbie,” he says.

A week and a half later, she has plans to get drinks with a guy from Bumble and she suggests the same bar. It's the first place she thinks of. That's all. 

Robbie feels a zap of awareness slide down his spine and looks up to see her walk in. She's wearing the same leather jacket and laughing with a guy who's classic Denver: plaid shirt, beard, ski pass prominently dangling from his jacket so everyone can know he's a season pass holder, loudly voicing opinions about craft beer that Robbie can hear all the way from the bar. She can do better, he thinks irrationally. He barely knows anything at all about her but there's something about her—something brilliant and quick—that makes him think she deserves someone who stares at her with a little bit of awe. 

“You're back,” is the only thing he says when she comes over to the bar to order for her and her date. 

“Thought I needed to cleanse the bad energy of my last date from here,” she says and makes a vague swooshing motion with her hand. “Besides, there's this crème brulee I saw on Instagram that I really want to try and last time I ran as soon as I could finish my drink.”

“The honey lavender one?”

She nods vigorously.

“Not on the menu tonight. Chef mainly does that one in the summer. But there's a ginger one she does in the winter that's usually on the menu Wednesdays and Thursdays.”

“I could do ginger.” She waits, glancing up at him through her eyelashes, and he remembers that he's supposed to ask her what she'd like to drink. 

“Whatever you feel like making me is good.” She leans forward a little on the counter, close enough that he can make out the deep amber color of the stones in her necklace and the gold buried deep in the brown of her eyes and he promptly turns to pull some bottles off the shelf behind him, trying to keep a flush from creeping up his neck. There's something almost magnetic about her, something that makes his gaze keep on sliding back to her and his body clock exactly how close she is to him at all times and lean forward in response. It's closer than he knows he should be getting to her. But it's also as natural as breathing. 

“That's a dangerous thing to say to a bartender,” he teases. But he already has an idea of what he's going to make her, something bright and playful to match the light in her eyes, with a paper cocktail umbrella on top.

“But see, I trust you now. We're bonded for life after I told you all about my awful date last time. You won't let me down.” 

He nods. “I'll try my best.”

Two weeks later, she's back with yet another guy. “Third time's the charm,” she says and shrugs when he's waiting at the end of the bar for her.

Third time is not the charm. She's back with a fourth guy the next week and by then, a few things have become clear. She has _awful_ taste in men. She has great taste in drinks. And she makes his heart want to beat straight out of his chest. 

“Maybe you should try a different bar,” Jemma suggests sweetly. “I know you love that place but I'm starting to worry that it's cursed. Every time you go there with a guy, it always seems to end badly.”

“Or I have terrible taste in men. Or Denver's a terrible place to date. We can't all meet the loves of our lives at eighteen, get together at nineteen—ably assisted by our genius best friends,” she adds. “No need to thank me, of course. All I ask is that you name your first-born child after me. Maybe your second-born too.”

“But there's a common denominator to all of these dates,” Jemma says. Daisy half expects her to go to the chalkboard that takes up half of their living room and start diagramming. “And it's the bar.”

“Or me.”

“Of course it's not you. You're perfect,” Jemma says loyally. “But we need to set up a control in order to properly determine whether it really is the bar or just the woefully adequate men of Denver. Possibly several controls. I can pull together a preliminary list--”

“Let's go there for drinks Thursday night. Bring Fitz along too. And I promise, it's not the bar.” Daisy holds her hand to her heart and tries to look Girl Scout innocent. “I just like their cocktail menu.”

Thursday night, they walk into the bar. She gives the tiniest wave to Robbie over her shoulder. Miniature, really. Jemma spots it anyway and her eyes light up with interest. And when they get a free round of the evening's specialty punch, served in deceptively delicate looking teacups and accompanied by a sideways grin and a wink from Robbie when the cups arrive at the table, Jemma is practically bouncing in her seat with excitement. Daisy tries very hard to keep her face neutral. She's going to be teased about this for weeks. Months, even. 

“I see what you keep coming back here for,” Jemma says, trying to hide her smirk as she takes a sip of her drink. “Or who.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“No date this time?” he asks when she goes over to say thank you. (It's the polite thing to do.)

“Just my best friend and her boyfriend. I set them up,” she says proudly. “Back in college. They're contractually obligated to let me be both the maid of honor and the best man when they get married.”

“Seems fair.”

“It's a good story, actually. I've polished it up over the years if you ever want to hear it—I do voices, actually.” It's silly. She nearly regrets saying it as soon as the words come out of her mouth. Up until now, their conversations have been snatches in between him taking people's drink orders and her making awkward small talk with her date of the week. Quick observations about whatever happens to be going on with them that night—the people he's seen come in, the fantasy series she's been obsessed with for the last month. There haven't been stories. She hasn't offered up any of her (way too complicated) history and simple and silly as the story of the elaborate lengths she went to in order to set up Jemma and Fitz, it's still something that matters to her. That she wants to tell him about.

“You know,” he says. “I think I would.”

He smiles and that dimple gets even deeper.

It's a few days before Thanksgiving and the bar is quieter than usual, relaxed enough that he can talk to her for more than five minutes where she's perched on a stool at the end of the bar. He brings her the new cocktail he's been working on and her eyes shut briefly in pleasure when she takes a sip.

“That is amazing. You're going to put that on the menu, right?”

“It's going to be a special first week in December. Bring your date of the week by to try it,” he teases.

“I don't have a date every week. Just most of them.” She winks at him and it's incredibly cheesy and it gets him anyway. “Are you doing anything for Thanksgiving?”

“My brother's coming up to stay the week. He's at college right now for electrical engineering. Stanford,” Robbie adds because he could brag about Gabe all day if someone gave him the opportunity. “We make these carnitas from our mom's recipe that have to simmer for eight hours and watch old Bond movies together. Are you going home or staying here?”

“Staying. Jemma's organizing a Thanksgiving dinner. We've been doing it ever since we met in college. My family really isn't...” She sighs and curls her hand a little tighter around her glass.

“Well, my dad's currently in jail for medical malpractice. My mom runs these meditation retreats that rich people pay thousands of dollars for, so those have take up most of her time for as long as I can remember. I don't really think either of them have ever thought I was worth paying much attention to.” She says it like it's nothing much but Robbie sees the flicker of hurt in her eyes and he--

“It's impossible for me not to pay attention to you. For anyone to. And if someone doesn't, it's their loss,” he blurts out.

Her eyes go very wide and she goes very still. Then she slides her hand on top of his on the bar and laces her fingers tight with us. Neither of them let go for a while. 

She brings dates to the bar all through December, when it's decorated with white lights and garlands of holly and half the drinks on the menu involve peppermint or chocolate, and January, when every guy she walks in with has a ski pass dangling from his puffy jacket and she seems to glow despite the stinging winter cold, and February, when he spends an entire week and a half coming up with rose cocktails for Valentine's Day and she brings him a box of half-priced chocolate the day after. Some of the guys she comes in with are obvious duds, preoccupied with their phones or with loudly proclaiming how much they know about Irish whiskey to everyone within earshot, but some of them, the ones who aren't idiots, seem pretty into her. But she never leaves with any of them and some nights, she seems to spend more time talking to him than to them. Robbie finds himself looking forward to those nights, more than he should. Sometimes her friends are with her instead and those nights are fun too, seeing the way she lights up when she's around them. She talks to him on those nights too, dragging him out from behind the bar to introduce him to Jemma and Fitz one slow night, and he likes that even more. 

She talks him into showing her a short story he's been working on and she doesn't stop telling him how good it is for weeks afterward. (Somehow, he knows that she means it.) He admires the sketches she does on bar napkins and when she shows him some of her graphic design work, he's so impressed that he seriously thinks of asking her to redo his car.

“It has flames on it,” he explains. “I was going through a phase.”

“You can't get rid of the flames!” she protests. “Those sound _iconic_.”

She convinces him to give one of her favorite fantasy series a chance and he's horrified when he finds out that the third book doesn't come out until 2022. He writes a list of his favorite movies in Spanish for her and she has thoughts on a new one every week. She tells stories about her days in college with Jemma and Fitz. He shows her photos of him and Gabe from when they were kids, They offer up little pieces of themselves to each other and miraculously, neither of them drops a single one.

February turns into March and March into April and she still comes by with her friends but there's fewer guys and then even fewer until there's none at all. He's not sure if it's because she's only seeing one guy or if it's because she's not seeing anyone at all and he—he knows it's dumb. But he knows that he'll be kicking himself if he doesn't ask. It's a bright blue day in April when he finally finds the courage to bring it up. 

“I noticed that you haven't been bringing any dates by—finally decided that the bar's cursed?” he asks while he slides a gin fizz across the bar to her. 

“I still cannot believe that Jemma told you her theory. She has a whole conspiracy board, you know—she made me go to three different craft stores to get the right kind of red string.” Daisy laughs and he can hear the affection in it. She loves the people close to her so intently—he can tell just from the way her voice sounds when she talks about them, the warmth and softness in it—and it floors him a little. “But no. Not many dates recently.”

“None of them what you're looking for?”

“No,” she says quietly. “But I think I've finally found it.”

His stomach slumps down to somewhere around his knees and he gives the bar a particularly vigorous wipe-down. She's met someone, then. He should have known better. He should have not waited so long. He should have...

“Yeah?” he says and keeps his eyes down on the bar. 

“Yeah.” Something about the tone of her voice makes him look up and she's looking at him, a smile slowly spreading across her face, and it's like being hit by a hundred sunbeams at once after the longest grayest winter in existence. 

“Are you doing anything Tuesday night? Because if you're not, I thought maybe we could go out to dinner. If you're interested. It's not a big deal if you're not, I just thought that maybe...” She's blushing now and he realizes with a jolt that she's nervous. That maybe this is something she's been working up her courage for too. 

“I am. Not doing anything and interested,” he clarifies. “Very, very interested. Very, very, very--”

He's not sure who leans forward first (he'd like to think it's him but it's probably her) but they meet somewhere in the middle and he's kissing her and he's written a million stories in his head about this moment but the real thing is so, so much better. It feels like the beginning of something, something they'll get a million more chances at but is perfect already, and he can already tell he's going to remember kissing Daisy Johnson for the rest of his life. 

“So you're going to pick me up in the car, right? It better still have flames painted on the side,” she says when she pulls away to take a breath. 

“I kept them just for you,” he tells her and kisses her again.


End file.
